Cecily Strong is only the fourth woman to have hosted Nerd Prom. But the women who came before her would rather not talk about that fact.

As of Saturday night, the SNL star is the most recent woman—LYLAS!—to host the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and the fourth member of an exclusive group that includes Paula Poundstone (1992), Elayne Boosler (1993), and Wanda Sykes (2009).

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According to Poundstone, who began performing in comedy clubs over three decades ago and is now a frequent panelist on NPR's weekly quiz show Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me, the precedent she was poised to set did not factor into her agonized decision to accept the coveted invitation.

Even as she acknowledges how few women have stood before the same audiences that she captivated, Poundstone is quick to dismiss "the whole gender thing."

"I work in a business where there is a smaller percentage of women than there are men," she asserts. "But I never think too much about gender—never did."

The politics of the commander-in-chief, however, did not escape her notice.

"George Bush was in office at the time," she recalls. "And I was such a self-righteous wench. I was very firm. I was a Democrat and I did not want to support him in any way."

Her liberal values notwithstanding, the comic relented.

"When I got to the hotel on the day of the event, there was a message on the phone from the White House. George Bush wanted to meet with me," Poundstone says. "Boy, I could not put my spine under my bed and run to the White House fast enough. It occurred to me that A. When in my life would I get another message that the White House was calling? And B. When would I ever be invited by any president to go anywhere?"

She "zipped over" to the famed address and "met with this unbelievably charming president." The experience, she says, "blew me away. Standing beside him was electric. And part of it was, I'm sure, the trappings of the office and the excitement of being at the White House. But it was beyond that. He was magnetic and very, very charismatic and very kind of silly and weird."

After the meeting, Poundstone confessed about the encounter to a friend—a congressman from Oregon. "I was so embarrassed to have caved and to have met with a Republican president," she explains. "When I went to see my friend, I said to him, 'He was just so charming!' And he told me the most insightful political fact anyone has ever said to me. He said, 'Paula, we're all charming, or we wouldn't get elected.'"

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The event, too, "did not feel like a normal gig to me," Poundstone says. "There was a real kind of fairytale quality to a lot of it."

But the enchantment faded the next morning. "I had worn this white tuxedo," Poundstone remembers. "And in the newspaper the next day, they had the balls to write about it. I think that might have been the one time that I ever thought about the fact that I was a woman. Because would they have done that for any other performer? Did anybody talk about what [Don] Imus wore? Or what Jim Morris wore the year before me? I just remember being struck by how much ink they wasted describing my outfit. Who gives a shit? Honestly, it's not like I was naked. By the way, it was a fabulous tuxedo."

The following year, Boosler, whom the New York Timescalled "one of the most likable standup comics in the country," did not have to make any moral calculations to accept her summons from the Clinton administration.

"I agreed right away," she says. "I had campaigned for Bill Clinton. I hosted the four-hour Constitution Hall Gala the night before the Inauguration. I met my husband at the Inauguration! I couldn't have been happier or more flattered to be asked."

Still, Boosler attempted nonchalance at a cocktail party on the evening of the dinner. Her dispassion did not last long.

"I had already met everyone in show business," she says. "I was never star struck in my life until then. Bill Clinton is truly electric, lit from inside, larger than life. Hillary was gorgeous and regal. What surprised me was how warm, fun, funny, down-to-earth, and likeable they all were. What a moment in time. We had a young, brilliant, beautiful government."

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Courtesy Elayne Boosler

For all the magic, Boosler was candid about the crowd: "No matter how well you do, no matter how much they laugh and clap, you are going to get trashed the next day. Remember, it's Congress. They deny they were there. They deny they had fun. They're so used to covering up their affairs, cheating, and dishonesty, they can't even admit they laughed the night before."

And while Cecily Strong vowed in her opening remarks on Saturday that she—a mere comedian—would not dare tell those assembled "how to do politics or whatever," which she archly likened to "you guys telling me what to do with my body," Boosler defends the license that comedians have to interfere in matters of government. For her, the intrusion is an almost civic obligation.

Quoting Mark Twain, who once said "I don't write jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts," Boosler contends that "the worse something is, the more the public needs to see it through the [lens of] humor—to make it more understandable, less intimidating, less apocalyptic. Everything horrible demands comedy, and nothing is more horrible than the U.S. Congress these days."

The more you marginalize yourself, the more others will do the same to you.

Like Poundstone, Boosler is reluctant to address the status of women in comedy: "The more you marginalize yourself, the more others will do the same to you. I'm a comedian. I do the job. Whoever can carry you out of the burning building gets to be the fireman. You have 15 seconds to be funny. After that, you're off and running—or not, whether you are a man or woman."

To be sure, Boosler maintains that she has never identified as a "female comedian—whatever that means." Instead, the advocate for animal rescue prefers to think of herself as "a small black man with dreadlocks." As ever, the quip is perfectly timed. And yet it belies the very real obstacles that even the most accomplished women continue to face.

In both politics and comedy, talented women are not singular curiosities or sparkly props. They are more than their wardrobes. Poundstone understands this. Strong, too, urged reporters to internalize it, compelling them this weekend to repeat after her: "I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary's appearance because that is not journalism." And to some degree, Boosler knows it.

Although she is averse to questions about gender and comedy, she needs no encouragement to discuss the upcoming presidential contest. "I will be [following]," she warns. "We are a thousand years late in having a woman president. I'd like to see one while I'm still writing."

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